


A Beautiful Hole

by Alona



Category: The Astronaut (Song)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-24
Updated: 2009-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-05 05:49:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/38422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alona/pseuds/Alona





	A Beautiful Hole

**Author's Note:**

  * For [zai](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=zai).



She loved him first for his dreams. In a world where everything was plastic and metal and subtly tarnished, he had dreams about the land, populated with heroes and monsters and living green trees, everything clean and fresh. He had dreams about the sea, where the monsters were stranger and it was bitterly cold, with the weight of entire world pressing down upon the dark civilizations of the sea-dwellers, who yet made beauty in their caverns. They were marvelous dreams, all the sorts of things a little girl with her head in the clouds loved to hear about, all the sorts of things a little boy could best convince himself were the way life really was. But about the sky, he had only the most practical of dreams, dreams of manuals and examinations and dull metal parts. It was the dream everyone must have, of contributing something, of being one more finger grimly holding on to the lip of a bottomless chasm.

That dream, she did not love. She did not love it when they first met as children, and she loved it less when they met many years later, she already pursuing her mad, useless career on the stage, he buried in astrophysics coursework. Like a mother trying to feed unappetizing green things to a child, he dressed it up for her, added dream-seasonings in the form of aliens and sentient celestial bodies, but she was as wise as a child and rejected it. Still, as she had done when they were children, she bore it and all the little sacrifices that attended it -- and they were so tiny, at first, barely even sacrifices at all. He was away no more than she was, his physical training was no more taxing than her rehearsals. They saw each other little, but when they did, she found that he was more than his dreams.

Second, and third, and fourth, she loved him for his off-key singing, and for his unabashed love of alphabet soup, and for the way he answered her questions about his work, as though he assumed as a matter of course that she would understand. Taking the bullet train to the theater, she would sometimes put away her scripts and spend a few minutes flipping through a science periodical, trying to live up to that assumption. She knew that she often didn't, but then, he had, upon her eighth mention of him that week, "never heard" of her favorite playwright, so she was secure in the knowledge that they both must, and could, forgive each other their little shortcomings.

Everything changed when he joined the Program. She knew nothing about it. It was incredibly prestigious. It was hideously important. All it meant to her was that he would go away for weeks, sometimes months, and be unable to tell her anything about it. At these times, she would melt into her roles, lose herself in women of other times and nations, women who walked under the light of different another sun than hers, a warmer and yellower sun. Their tragedies were her tragedies, their joys kept her company in the night when he was gone.

In later days, when his absences drew on and on, she called the number he had once given her several times a day, spoke to the same two men again and again, cried to them, cursed at them, and still she learned nothing. Always, always it would end with him returning, a passionate reunion, and then, the thing she had come to dread, the quiet. She had spent too little time being herself. She no longer knew what the woman she was would say to the man he was, and she had the sense, when circumstances forced them to trade words, that he had lost some hold on himself as well. In her own mind this was clear, but the words that would warn him, bring him back to her, help him bring her back to herself, those words were in a language she could not remember knowing.

Two men came to see her at the theater one day, when he had been gone for two months, and she knew them by their voices, and she knew, because they had come in person, and because there was pain and compassion in their voices where before there had only been irritation and strained patience, that he was dead. When they told her, she only swayed a little. They exchanged matching, ill-masked expressions of relief. They had heard her anger and her grief already, and they had been bracing for far more. But though she could feel the place where her heart was screaming, it was hidden away deep down, and by the time its cries reached the surface they were wilted and battered things, without the force to knock her over. The men promised her all the support the Program could give her, short of giving her the truth about his death, or even what his life had been immediately prior to it. She accepted this. For the moment, she was prepared to accept anything, if it would make them leave.

In the quiet after they had gone, she slowly drove away the women she had inhabited, who had inhabited her. Some were young, and they pouted and argued and tried to bargain; others were old, and they went easily, knowing why she needed to be free of them all. Eventually she was only herself, and there was no more quiet for her. The words she had lost somewhere inside herself came back, and she knew what they meant, and she knew that without her noticing it the sacrifices, which had been so small, so manageable, had grown. The Program had not been pleased with sacrifices of time, not even offerings of mere flesh; it had wanted nothing less than souls, and she had nearly given her own.

She loved him at last because she could mourn for him, and it would keep her close to herself. He had left such a beautiful hole in her newly-reclaimed heart that there was no danger of losing it again, as she once again took up the science periodicals and began plotting her course back to him.


End file.
